Timely Lord: Dr Who Adventures Out Already

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Super quick link ’em up post, as I’ll hopefully be bunging up some impressions a bit later tonight. BUT the first episode of the free Doctor Who Adventures, City of The Daleks, has mysteriously turned up for download already, despite officially not due until Saturday. UK only for now, however.

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Outside the UK
If you live outside the UK, the first Adventure Game will be available to purchase in early July. We will have more information shortly on release dates and where you can buy them, so watch this space!
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It’s bad enough our license fee is making some probably rubbish game without giving it away to the foreign types. And I love the BBC! They should definitely have synchronised giving it away and charging for it.

I look forward to checking this out – although given how they’re presumably going for a non-gaming audience primarily, I’m surprised they didn’t make it just work inside a browser, rather than requiring fiddly Java, downloading and installation.

@ Dan: “if you pirate it the chances are this will never happen again”

Surely it will just show up in the BBC’s figures as a UK download? As long as they can show that people like it (and download it) it will be deemed a “success”. They are not required to make a profit from UK viewers (or in this case downloaders). The worst thing they can do is not have enough viwers/downloaders.

Often the BBC *want* to broadcast stuff overseas for free (eg on iPlayer) but they either can’t due to a) not having the licensing rights for some element b) having an agreement with a local broadcaster who has the ‘local rights’ c) not wanting to distort local media markets…

I don’t mind paying, but make those of us who are no longer a part of the empire on whom the sun never sets wait a whole month? Is this revenge for all the times publishers from the states messed up y’alls release dates and made you wait while we played?

Just so we’re clear, giving something away for free in one part of the world and charging for it in others is probably not the best business model. I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure 99% of people outside the UK are going to say, “But it’s free there!” and acquire it through slightly less legal means.

Actually we’re not. I know I’d happily pay the license fee to get access to iplayer and bbc tv overseas. As would almost every ex-pat i’ve spoken to. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to do it…

BBC would make a fortune if they could figure out a way to make it work, but I guess they’d have to deal with a nightmare tangle of licensing deals.

If they’re gonna carge those diry foreign types, they should be doing it now. Rather than waiting.

For if they wait, all those weirdo people in those other places of the world than these lovely isles will totally be taking it through interweb tube leakages with their dirty, dirty foreign ways.

I hear the women in those foreign places don’t even shave their underarms! How dare they take things free from our wonderful institutions. Grubby hands. OFF!

In other news, my bloody TV license paid for those games. The ‘freeness’ of them in the UK is debateable. It does not justify proxy whatnot downlody-ness. But, then again, any justification will do, eh? ARRR, shiver me timbers and whatnot?

Also, time to deviation to piracy discussion at its lowest on non-directly piracy related post on RPS?

For all those worried about using proxies to get the game outside the UK – it won’t work.

You can download the installer alright, but the installer also checks that you’re in the UK somehow, and won’t install if you’re not.

So us dirty foreign types will just have to wait until July. :(

I really, really don’t get the delay. I’d buy it now if I could. But by July I’ll be pissed off at having had to wait, and someone will have probably spoiled it for me and the season of Dr. Who will already be over and I just won’t be that interested in playing it anymore.

Assuming the License Fee covered the BBC’s development & operational cost already, I really don’t get why this isn’t free everywhere. I kinda doubt there would be a massive flood of downloaders from other countries (and if anyone should be able to cope with high demand, it’s a de facto-tax funded national broadcaster). But then, I don’t get why broadcasters like the BBC limit their content to the country anyway.

If this is actually a move against piracy, they should get certain consultants from France in…

The licence fee only covers 76% of the BBC’s current revenue. Most of the rest is paid for by selling content to overseas providers and BBC commercial ventures – DVD box sets and now game sales based on popular franchises.

Doctor Who is one of the five top grossing titles for BBC Worldwide. As I understand it, it has quite a cult following outside of the UK. Given that UK residents are forced to fund it to own a TV, I believe the BBC not only has a right to make money from it’s content overseas, but it could even argued that they have a duty to do so to ease the burden on UK tax-payers.*

That’s just my point – I think they won’t get a substantial amount of money for this game. Most of the people that care will use the delay plus cost as an excuse to acquire it through magical means OF WHICH I KNOW NOTHING, and the BBC is no better off.

Well, the installer connects to the internet for some reason. And say ‘for some reason’ because I haven’t fully thought it out but I assumed it was to verify my location in the world. The game installed and plays fine from what little I played and I live in New York.

Incidentally, I just saw “Daleks in Manhattan” yesterday. Going to the Empire State Building to look for Dalek parts tomorrow.

Just finished. For a free (if you’re in the UK) episodic game, it’s pretty good quality. It is squarely aimed at the younger Doctor Who audience in terms of its complexity, but it’s quite polished for a first try by the BBC at this sort of thing, and you can tell that the input from Cecil has made it better than it could have been. Main criticisms being the slight over-reliance on the sneaky bits and use of the same puzzle, and the speech audio being a bit echoey in odd places. Also, Matt Smith’s default setting in this seems to be “whisper”, not sure why, especially when Karen Gillan is speaking normally. Still, good start, so hopefully it will do well, and as a result improve over the episode arc.
Also quite like the mimicking of the TV Show credits, and the way they both bundle quite quickly into the Tardis for take off on the menu screen when you quit :D

Good idea, Matt. Also, since most Internet competitions aren’t available to enter for free in the UK, but rather cost infinity quid, I’m perfectly justified in stealing whatever the prize is from a local shop.

Better :-D But still not the same. The distribution of the free Dr. Who game isn’t a competition.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that the point is that the BBC was a bit naive to think that in today’s world one can get away with releasing something for free in the UK and charge for it at a later date abroad. On the internet, such silly economic borders don’t work – kinda like how I let an American friend gift me me new games over steam then repay him the American price over Paypal, instead of paying the ludicrous Euro prices.

Yeah, Rinox, it was intended (honest) to be pretty insane, because I thought Matt’s original comment was pretty insane too. It’s NOT a ‘free game’, any more than the BBC channels and radio are ‘free’ in Blighty: they’re paid for by an annual subscription to the organisation’s content service. It’s idiotic to think that’s the same thing.

True, of course, it’s made with (British) tax payer money and thus made (especially) for you Brits. But again, it’s naive of them to think that you can apply this type of thinking to a piece of software that is available for download online.

@ Rinox: “…the BBC was a bit naive to think that in today’s world one can get away with releasing something for free in the UK and charge for it at a later date abroad…”

I bet the BBC are fully aware that loads of people use proxies to access iPlayer – and will do the same to download this game. However publically they have to pretend that they are “selling” their content to overseas markets so as to not upset all the lawyers, regulators and politicans.

I’d also guess that the people at the BBC who are producing this game will be happy if the number of “UK downloads” is high and won’t get in much trouble if it fails to sell overseas. Selling the whole series to BBC America is what brings in the overseas money and the costs of the games will just be bundled in with the rest of the series. I can’t see “games sales in the US” being a deal breaker, whereas loads of UK downloads will be treated as a ‘success’, even if everyone at the BBC knows full well that a fair percentage of them weren’t really UK downloads.

I’m not sure I see a need for it, since a BBC dvd costs around twice as much as their US/Australian equivalent with half the content (but often twice the quality). They’re popular enough they even get their own sections in stores.

“…Those who simply ignore the BBC will, for the most part, get away with it. Even at the best, the BBC manages to proecute only a tiny percentage of evaders – and these are always those who are prepared to admit the crime! If convicted, it’s not so terrible – maybe more a badge of honour. The fine (usually £150) is hardly more than the price of a licence and is about as much a badge of shame as a parking ticket. But here’s the key point: you’ll only get convicted if you admit it. The key tactic of resistance is to throw away all the mailed demands, ignore the pathetic threats and in the unlikely event that one of the BBC’s hired goons shows up at your doorstep, say absolutely nothing…”

I read here, or in that other Doctor Who thread, that if you leave the proxy site open it will install with no problem. I had no idea about that, and I did in install it while inadvertently leaving the window open and it installed with no issue. I live in America by the way.

So I am from the UK, but when I try to install it sticks its fingers in its ears and tells me I’m not connected to the internet, despite obviously being so. None of the limited advice on the BBC page has helped.